Avoid moving from a dumb pipe to a dumb cloud

Back in 1998 when Google Search started to replace AltaVista, could you imagine the company would be laying fiber in Kansas City in 2012 to offer a 100 times faster Internet service? Or that the New York Stock Exchange would evolve from a trading floor in its 1903 building on Broad Street, to offering virtual and physical colocated computing infrastructure services in its New Jersey data center?

With these new tools, the cloud provides a significant opportunity for small and midsize organizations with data centers less than 1,000 square feet by collapsing their servers and storage into the cloud. The new network to the cloud will change their IT business model, making it more efficient, less costly and more secure.

Larger enterprises and government organizations will also experience the benefits of a cloud backbone network between existing data center facilities and external cloud service providers. Enterprise IT organizations will have much greater agility and flexibility to deploy the workload for the business where it makes the most sense. The operating mantra for these organizations can be summarized as, "own the base, rent the spike."

The New Service Providers will take the business beyond just bandwidth (or dumb pipes), to a more integrated approach to information processing. They will accelerate and expand cloud deployments by enabling more innovative applications that take advantage of the advanced cloud networking and integration of all the cloud components.

Ciena is the network specialist, collaborating with customers worldwide to unlock the strategic potential of their networks and fundamentally change the way they compete. With focused innovation, Ciena brings together the reliability and capacity of optical networking with the flexibility and economics of Ethernet, unified by a software suite that delivers the industrys leading network automation.